7 Different Ways to Start a Song

Starting a song a different way each time ensures that you’re writing something that’s fresh and unique.

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Humans are creatures of habit. Once we find a way that works for us, we’re likely to stick with that way, whether it’s the way we clean the house, walk the dog, or write a piece of music. With housecleaning and dog walking, it doesn’t much matter how you do it, as long as it gets done. With songwriting, using the same procedure or formula every time you write is a problem. It means that your music is going to start to sound the same, and we can’t have that.

In this blog posting, I want to encourage you to explore outside your “safe zone” of composition by considering different ways that individual songs can be started. Here’s a list of 7 different ways you might start a song. How many of these do you ever try?

1. Chords First. The problem with chords first is that the melodies that come from chords might be neglected and uninteresting, though there’s no reason that this should necessarily be. Suggestion: Once you’ve developed a chord progression that you like (3 or 4 chords is usually sufficient), try working out some lyric as a next step. Lyrics can often suggest melodic shape, and that will go a long way to helping a chords-first song sound more interesting.
2. Melody First. Starting a song with the melody has the advantage of allowing you to create shapes that will possibly stick in the listeners’ minds. Suggestion: Once you’ve begun putting a melody together, move next to lyric. The words you apply to the melody need to sound natural. The melody itself will already imply the chords that you’ll wind up using.
3. Lyrics First. One of the problems with developing a lyric is the tendency we have to think of written lyric as being a poem. But some of the best lyrics are not necessarily great poems. When you look at the words to McCartney’s “Yesterday”, they’re rather unremarkable. But partnered with the melody and chords, those lyrics are as close to perfect as they can be. Suggestion: Keep the words of your lyrics simple, always opting for common, everyday language to describe hopefully simple concepts.
4. Instrumental background hook first. Think of the start of The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey”, or Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” Those intros are very distinctive and immediately identifiable. Suggestion: Develop a 1- or 2-bar rhythmic/melodic groove, and plan to use it as your intro as well as a connector between verses. Allow ideas from that hook to help you create melodic ideas that can develop into verse and chorus melodies.
5. Borrow from folk songs. There are thousands of song collections that are in the public domain, songs for which you don’t need permission to use. If you use a folksong “as is”, you need to designate the author as “Traditional”, or “Anonymous”. Suggestion: Instead of using an entire folksong, try borrowing a short fragment of a melody and see if you can expand on it, or change it in some way. The basic shape and idea of the song will have been informed by this treatment, and you’ll enjoy the uniqueness of a song that started from something you didn’t actually write.
6. Borrow from Classical music. I did a blog post once about how to take a chord progression from a Classical piece and use it for your own, but you can do the same thing with melodies. The music you borrow needs to be in the public domain if you use enough of it to be recognizable. Sometimes radically altering the tempo of a Classical song can give you something that seems to be completely new. Suggestion: Use the first bar of a well-known Classical tune, and use it as a starting point to create an entirely new melody.
7. Jab your finger on a page of text. This can be kind of fun: Grab a book off your shelf, open to a random page, point blindly to a word, and create a line of lyric that can serve as a first line for a verse or chorus. Suggestion: Do this several times, and you start to notice that you’re creating many lines with similar sentiments and emotions. (When I did this, I pointed at the word “such”, and created “Such a great day to be alive…”. I then pointed to “falling” and created “falling in love every day with you…”, and so on.

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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